It's a hot day in mid summer. A handful of students play Frisbee on Boston University's Marsh Plaza; sunbathers dot the lawn behind the chapel, a few more ride by on bikes. Except for the steady swish of cars on Storrow Drive, the campus is still — downright lethargic.

Inside the mostly empty George Sherman Union (GSU), two gray-haired ladies drink Starbucks coffee from paper mugs. A tall, elegant woman with snow-white hair makes her way up the open stairway in the lobby. At 10:50 am, the coffee drinkers rise and follow her.

Upstairs, a stylish middle-aged woman dressed all in white waits for her husband. He stops to chat with another couple as they pass him on the stairs.

These are the BU Evergreeners — chatty and well-dressed, brandishing ballpoints and Starbucks, they're here for the 11 am lecture on "Edward Hopper and His Contemporaries" in the GSU's Conference Auditorium.

Hair flying, Professor Jonathan Ribner bolts up the isle on the left. He spreads his notes on the podium and looks out over an audience of nearly 70. Rarely are his undergrads so captivated. The talking lulls to a murmur.

Seminars such as this one cost from $30 to $60 and last several weeks. They're devoted to a variety of subjects, generally focused in the liberal arts, and are offered year-round. For $75 per course, Evergreen students can also audit any undergraduate or graduate course offered in the BU catalog.

Evergreen is one of several Boston-area programs catered specifically to senior citizens. It attracts upwards of 300 people per year, ages 58 and older, and the size of the student body is rising steadily.

Across the river, the Harvard Institute of Learning in Retirement (HILR), a peer-teaching program with more than 500 participants is now so popular that it turns away people. Brandeis has its own version, the Bernard Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (Bolli), and there are dozens of other continuing-ed programs open to everyone — including senior citizens — at schools all over Greater Boston.

After years spent toiling in offices, raising families, and paying taxes, the Evergreen students seem thrilled to be back at school. It's as though they've come full circle — arriving back at the last time they felt free of responsibility. Unlike their late-teen undergraduate counterparts, though, they haven't got the pressures of young adulthood looming over them.

Definitely old school
Lori Wassermann, a slender 67-year-old with brown pixie-cut hair, has been attending Evergreen seminars for nearly four years. She's been to lectures on film, jazz, architecture, and American lit, and plans to audit music courses at BU once she retires.

No stranger to academia, Wassermann has two graduate degrees from Harvard and a double major in English and math from Pennsylvania's Bucknell University.

When she decided to continue her studies, she chose Evergreen because it was affordable and gave her access to BU professors, as opposed to, say HILR and other peer programs, where "members" teach and mentor each other.

"The BU one suits me so well," she says, seated in a study lounge upstairs at the GSU. "They don't talk down to you; they assume that the people are bright, and so you learn a lot. It isn't just a time filler. A lot of programs just sort of assume retirees only want to know about trips they can take."

Across the Universe Intuition tells us that certain places are powerful, that certain spaces are sacred, and that we are sometimes in the presence of cosmic energy.

Acquiring minds Given that virtually every activity in our lives is experienced through purchases, the exhibition’s focus on branding is sure to resonate with those of us facing post-holiday bills.

School spirits It's back-to-school time, and you know what that means: throngs of college kids swarming the city, stealing back your summer fling (okay, he was19), and generally making you feel old.

Poetry in motion The eyes have it in Love’s Labour’s Lost , in which ocular imagery duels with what Harold Bloom calls a “florabundance of language” in the arch arias of courtier Berowne, who sees himself writ large in the “pitch-ball” peepers of Rosaline.

25 Classes That Will Get You $50K Unless you dream of becoming, say, a Franciscan monk, a retail clerk, or a freelance writer, vows of poverty probably don’t show up on your career checklist.

The unfaithful scholar Perhaps you were lured by the promise of original Abraham Lincoln speeches (Boston College) or a castle (Emerson’s Kasteel Well, a 12th century landmark in the Netherlands).

Books tour While most area colleges continue to offer predictably boring campus tours that amount to wandering through academic ghost towns imagining departed crowds, there are also some alternatives to the standard walk-and-talk routine.

Steering off course We recommend the course taught by the indie filmmaker, the course inspired by a Daily Show regular, and the course considered “experimental.”

Bully for BU! After six years at the Phoenix , I recently got my first pre-emptive libel threat. It came, most unexpectedly, from an investigative reporter. And beyond the fact that this struck me as a blatant attempt at intimidation, it demonstrated how tricky journalism's new, collaboration-driven future could be.